Super Rude Bear Resurrection Just Dying to Launch on May 2

Hey, Alex Rose here. I’m the creator of Super Rude Bear Resurrection, which is coming to PS4 on May 2!

SRBR is a ridiculously hardcore platformer, but one that anyone can beat! When you die, you can jump on your previous bear corpses and use them to get ahead. You can push them around, use them as meatshields, press buttons with them, and so on. Every death makes the game just slightly easier.

If you get crushed by a boulder, next time it’s slightly slower. Die on an axe, and your corpse gets stuck to the blade. Got killed by a liquid nitrogen missile? Your frozen body becomes a floating platform to protect you.

Eventually, die enough, and you’ll be able to beat any level.

But for those of you who can’t resist a challenge, it’s actually possible to beat the entire game without dying. It’s just insanely difficult. The game is super fair — you never get killed out of nowhere and all the hitboxes are lenient, but the levels become nightmarishly hard. And you’ll have to live through that nightmare if you want to unlock the Platinum Trophy.

I grew up playing challenging 90’s platformers and amped the toughness up to 11. Normally when you’re designing a game, you have to design based on the least skilled players and make sure the game is possible to defeat by most people.

Not with Super Rude Bear Resurrection. I designed the game so that it’s physically possible to beat without dying, and then focused on making the game autobalance with each death. But if you turn off corpses, you’re left with a challenge so difficult you would normally only ever find it in a romhack.

The game is also speedrun friendly. All randomness is all based on your corpse count, so as long as you never die, every run is the same. You can also turn off randomness completely in the menu. There’s a Practice Mode for practicing specific sections, a quick load menu that allows you immediate access to any level from the pause menu, leaderboards, and more.

I’ve been working on Super Rude Bear Resurrection for three years, obsessively tweaking every little detail in the design to make everything feel as good as possible — to me that’s the most important thing in a platformer: it has to feel perfectly fluid. It has to feel like your fault when you die. Your character should be an extension of yourself.

Moreover, we took the time to make the sound incredible. Sound and music are important to me, so I teamed up with my favourite UK Grime producer Deeco who’s made a 73 song soundtrack for Super Rude Bear Resurrection. Every single level has a unique track, and (I’m allowed to say this because I didn’t make it) — the soundtrack is incredible. Deeco is an absolute genius who never ceased to surprise me with how much awesomeness he could create.

Not only that, but the sound effects were handled by Pierre-Jean Griscelli, sound designer extraordinaire from Batman Arkham Knight.

My number one priority was to make sure the game sounds and feels awesome, and I believe I’ve achieved this. I’ve sunk in countless hours playing it over the past three years and I don’t just develop it, I play it obsessively.

Feel free to ask anything you want in the comments! I’ll be happy to answer.

Yeah, in terms of it being fast, tight, one-hit-death it’s a lot like Meat Boy. The levels are much larger and broken up by checkpoints though. The bosses have had a lot of thought into them. It’s physics based, so you can push things around, turn things etc.

It’s also very fast paced, SMB had a lot of parts where you had to wait for things to happen and then move. SRBR is more like “you can always move, it’s just really hard”. And obvs there’s the whole “if you die it gets easier” thing.

Will there be any PS4 Pro support, and what is the framerate like?
Also, are there long load-times between deaths? Seems like that might harm the flow.
Either way, the idea is unique and the game seems really fun.
I hope after these years of work you can manage to deliver a satisfying product and be successful with it.